Shutterbabe

Perfect Balance.

Shrouded with solitude and silence.

Life...

Is perfect.

Contrary to the internal turmoil I have been experiencing as of late, time at this very moment, is serene.

I have just breached the 100^th page of Shutterbabe, and with that, I feel full of musing, inquiry, and speculation. Before I move on to part two, “Stop,” I feel that I must share what is on my mind.

Deborah is a slut. By all means of High School definitions, she is a promiscuous ho bag. Men to her, as she puts it herself, are like books:

“... To be read, or skimmed, studied or forgotten, enjoyed for the moment or digested in a forever kind of way. A few go back on the shelf and gather dust, others I might pull out now and again to reread a passage or two or three or fifteen. What I mean is that they can’t all be Anna Karenina, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy them just the same... And just as each book I read changes me in some small, or perhaps large way, each man I bed, to be perfectly hyperbolic, makes me feel that much more attuned to the transcendence and bounty and beauty of life.” (Kogan, 81)

That passage doesn’t sound nearly as crude as what one might associate with “Slut.” So is she? No! She’s empowered, free and in charge of her own life. Reading the book makes me feel empowered myself. It makes me feel proud to be a woman, and ready to embrace life in the fullest.

This is much like how I feel while reading Tom Robbins books, most recently Still Life with Woodpecker. Tom Robbins’ writings glorify female being. Sexuality, beauty and mystery. With his blatant, yet poetic descriptions of such things as “Peach Fish,” I feel exalted with what I am.

I’ve got Tom Robbins with me, encouraging the acknowledgment of pure feminine beauty, and Deborah Copaken Kogan flaunting the empowered existence of Womanhood, but then there’s the view held that these things are unacceptable.

Were I reading a memoir of a man who spoke of women the way Kogan does of men, would I not cast him angrily aside as a chauvinistic pig?